Progressive Caucus’ Endorsement of 32-Hour Workweek Act
takano.house.gov
takano.house.gov
I'd really love to see healthcare completely separated from work in my life time. A few years ago I ended up having to get my own and it's real nice to be able to choose what insurance I want instead of having one forced on me and then changed every year. It actually influences my thoughts about expanding my business to the point were it would be required because so far everyone is happier with a salary bump to cover the cost and being able to choose.
https://www.irs.gov/affordable-care-act/employers/identifyin...
The only way to really fix it is to make health care not connected to employers in the first place so your hours/number of employers don't matter.
no the ONLY thing that happened is those workers had 15% of their hours cut, i.e they took a 15% pay cut.
40% of Americans are already covered by socialized medicine, between Medicare, Medicaid and the VA. We're really only looking to expand that from 40% to 100%. It's not nearly the jump into the chasm of socialism the right is painting it as.
If we can't bring the Manchins of the world onboard, at the very least require all employees, regardless of hours worked, to receive healthcare and if you work for multiple employers, then they can sort out amongst themselves.
Was it the law, or the shitty companies taking advantage of a "loophole" in an unethical manner? You're attributing the fault incorrectly, IMO.
Perverse incentives are hard not to introduce in a complex legislative push. But whoever wrote that specific provision either never worked for a company that saw them as expendable, or might as well have forgotten that the sun can rise.
I like a lot of what the ACA did. But the instability and financial strain I've seen that came from the economic restructuring the provision caused single-handedly butchered my faith in the government's competence to help its citizens for years.
That doesn't mean people weren't struggling before. But I've never met anybody at the low-end of the employment spectrum who the provision actually helped.
The state is supposed to keep these large organizations under control, and the sin is its failure to execute on that portion of its mandate.
I'm not sure what part of US history gave you the impression that this is how our `state`s are defined. But this has very much not been what this country considers it's responsibility, and it probably never will without a massive, multi-decade overhaul or a revolution.
Though the US government isn't nearly as overbearing as a European state, it's still active in the domain of regulation and the public is generally fine with that.
Thr US government has long-since taken up the mantle of corporate regulation. Its presence is felt in nearly every aspect of our economy. That presence is seemingly just as often the product of corruption as it is altruism, and it's only occasionally competent. But it's there, and no serious political force seems interested in completely removing it. At most the republicans want to reduce it in some capacity, and principled libertarians are a sideshow.
Big and well funded employers love the competitive advantage of having lower per employee administrative costs over smaller employers.
This was sort of fixed at the end of 2016 by allowing all employers to reimburse employees for employee purchased health insurance with pre tax income.
Employers also love obfuscating labor prices so it makes it more difficult for employees to compare wages from employer to employer (although paystubs and box 12 code dd of w-2 does show you the price of the health insurance you are getting, but you usually do not have access to this information when deciding on a job offer).
- The cost of government provided healthcare does not match dollar for dollar or below private health insurance
- There is no value add from a supplemental policy
While I want to be able to choose my own insurance because I think I could select a better one, my HSA with my company costs me either $0 or like $2 a month. The PPO is like $100 / month. If I got my own, personal insurance, it would easily be $600/mo.
Now, I can afford this; but people who make less than a software engineer absolutely could not; and, they're not going to be getting an 8k / year raise (taxes) to compensate for that. It'd be nice (edit: if) they were; but, they won't.
OP has an interesting point, but at the societal level it's not fair to do comparisons with an unpriced externality in one of the alternatives.
Anecdotally, I was required to use the VA and only the VA for a period of time. Private healthcare options drastically improved my quality of life during this time.
Can't we just be normal for a few years and see how that goes?
i.e I am sure you believe the market is the problem, where I believe government is the problem, so since I believe government is the problem i certainly do not believe giving more control to the same government that created the problem is the solution to the problem
A politician that never acts unless there is a complete consensus is a pretty lousy politician and should probably be voted out of office.
Government didn't create this problem because it didn't mandate that employee healthcare be a benefit from employers. That was simply "laissez-faire capitalism", i.e., the belief that the market is all-knowing and will eventually guide us to an efficient and effective equilibrium. Except that really only happens in perfect markets and they don't exist outside of textbooks.
No it absolutely was not. Employer provided benefits like health care became a part of the compensation package as a direct result of Government imposed Wage Controls during WWII, companies then had to get creative to attract talent because they could not simply offer more income like laissez-faire capitalism would have normally resulted.
It is increasingly frustrating that people do not understand American history enough to see all the time the government has causes a problem, then rides in with a novel solution to the problem they caused. Employers have zero desire to linked to health insurance, and laissez-faire capitalism most certainly did not create this link.
>the belief that the market is all-knowing and will eventually guide us to an efficient and effective equilibrium.
Almost no one that supports free markets believe this, it is a trope used by people to straw-man. free markets are not perfect, not by a long shot, they are however infinitely preferable to government, why? Market for the most part give you choice, when choice is taken out of the market one can often find government regulation behind that removal. Government is the removal individual choice, I like choice, I like freedom, I have no desire to have my healthcare controlled by the 535 morons in the US Congress, I know that makes me "crazy"
Now, given the way the world is, at this second, how do you see this evolution actually going?
I would like to be able to keep my preferred doctor when I switch jobs.
> This legislation would reduce the standard workweek from 40 hours to 32 hours by lowering the maximum hours threshold for overtime compensation for non-exempt employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).
It doesn't mean we're all suddenly working 8 fewer hours. It doesn't mean anything at all for exempt employees (like most of us engineers).
It would only mean that hourly, non-exempt workers would be paid 50% more for hours 33-40 every week.
It's a symbolic bill, though, so it's not actually intended to pass.
I’m not advancing some jaded, cynical conspiracy theory. This is simply a mechanic of modern American politics, same as how a phone app operates on a structure that most users are unaware of. I say this not to sway you to one side or another, just be aware that like you have your professional hidden world, politics has its as well.
It’s a reflection of the dysfunction that is currently playing out. Democrats hold a trifecta in the Federal Government and can’t even pass a law to make abortion legal throughout the country. They absolutely have the power to do so. They could have threatened SCOTUS with passing this law if SCOTUS decided to let the State Abortion bans stand. But they didn’t.
They also can’t end the filibuster without Joe Manchin.
The Senate is split 50/50 so the have the slimmest possible majority, and abortion is a hill nearly all Republicans are willing to die on.
I’m not sure this has anything to do with the current distinction unless by the current distinction you mean the nearly equal split.
Vs. what he said:
> > They also can’t end the filibuster without Joe Manchin.
They don't have a majority without Joe Manchin, and therefore cannot change Senate rules without his participation.
With a 50/50 Senate, Democrats need Manchin more than he needs them.
He’s also the only Democrat who can possibly win in WV where trump won by 40 points.
> but he’s not the only centrist in the party
Legalized abortion isn’t an issue that centrists oppose.
It's very difficult to read and honestly comes off as immature, as if the writer has an incredibly limited grasp of English sentence and paragraph structure.
Seriously tho, google “boomer ellipses” and you’ll find many theories for why people do this.
It seems to me that Republicans have opposed abortion more consistently than either party has acted on any other policy position. (Not totally consistently, but more consistently than on anything else.) It's hard to view that as hypocrisy. You can oppose it, hate it, whatever, but they do seem to be following through on their position.
And, what progress have they made? They went from a 7-2 liberal Supreme Court majority in 1972 to a 6-3 conservative majority today. That's where they made progress on defeating abortion.
I feel like 32 hours is too big of a step, but 36 hours is an idea I've been advocating for awhile.
It's a hedge against automation; it should push up the price of labor by reducing supply; and it just makes life significantly better for everyone.
This wouldn't be a "hedge against automation", it would be a catalyst for further automation. You'll reach the point where the only sensible thing for a company to do is to automate.
It may make life better for those who are still employable in a market where it's cheaper to pay a few engineers to design automation than to pay all the overtime you'd otherwise need to be shelling out. And in the long run (100 years out) we'll probably be better off for the automation. But in the short run intentionally making people harder to employ doesn't make any sense to me.
If it's inevitable that x% of jobs are going to be automated in the next decade, reducing the supply of labor by x% is a reasonable hedge. Yes, it may mean that x+y% (where y is something significantly less than x) are actually automated, but IMO we are still better off.
The thing is, there's some jobs that are very resistant to automation, and this will tend to spread them over more people and push their wages up by reducing supply.
> But in the short run intentionally making people harder to employ doesn't make any sense to me.
Right now there's a lot of talk about increasing minimum wage. I think shortening the work week is better, because it spreads the higher skilled jobs around more people and doesn't exclude people whose current labor value is less than a higher minimum wage from the work force.
The 40 hour work week has been good for everyone. Do you believe 40 is the ideal number, and can't be improved upon by moving it in either way? I think that:
- looming issues that may reduce demand for labor
- increased productivity that the benefits of have almost all accrued to capital instead of to labor
- other developed countries doing OK at 36
all argue that 40 hours may have been ideal for 1940 and something more like 36 hours is ideal for now.
If I work 32 hours a week instead of 40, is my employer still going to pay me the same amount of money? Or only 80%?
If only 80%, does the Progressive Caucus think that everyone's going to be thrilled at having to take a 20% pay cut?
Or do they think employers are going to pay the same out of the goodness of their hearts? Or are they going to require employers to pay the same?
If the employers have to pay the same for less work (= less stuff produced), is there any realistic scenario where that won't be inflationary?
If companies have to pay the same for less work, that's a higher hourly rate. Won't they simply lay off those who don't produce enough per hour to cover their cost?
Is there any way this doesn't have very negative second-order effects?
So: Is this just a publicity stunt by the Progressive Caucus? Or do they really not understand second-order effects (and basic economics)?
Changing their workweek from 40 to 32 basically means a 20% reduction in healthcare workers. How are we going to suddenly add 20% more workers to the industry?
And if the idea was to keep the same pay for 32 hour workweek, it just means healthcare costs just went up 20%.
It's not clear to me how this would make sense.
Where it gets most interesting is professions say 50% above minimum wage where it's customary for people to work long hours. This really increases pressure on employers to train up lower skilled workers to these roles and incentives for others to make the cut.
It also has a big effect on what happens during economic upswings. If you have to stretch an existing worker pool further suddenly, it gets more expensive, and workers get a bigger piece of the pie.
- Under the previous contract, most of you worked 50 hours and got 40 * $100/hour plus 10 * $150/hour = $5500/week.
- Under the new contract, we expect most of you will still work 50 hours, and will get 36 * $100/hour + 14 * $150/hour = $5700/week. This is on the par with the 3.6% wage increase you expected.
Vs. having to move base pay to $103-104/hour.
It sure increases the pressure to find new employees, though, because you can save a whole lot of overtime pay.
Ok, so pay/costs go up 10%, then (time and a half for 8 hours is 4 extra hours worth of pay)? Or does the total pay stay the same? (In which case, what's the point.)
I assume this would also be true of factory or construction workers. You can't suddenly make 20% more widgets an hour. So either we hire 20% more workers or pay 10% more for existing workers to work the same schedule.
Anecdotally, I have a couple of friends in med school. They both had above average MCAT scores, one had like high 90s percentile. They both applied to multiple med schools, and got rejected by all of them. They both had to take a gap year and then applied again the next year, and then they got accepted. This is the norm (actually I think many have to take 2+ gap years), it is extremely difficult to get into med school. I'm not saying it shouldn't be hard, but it probably needs to be easier if we want more doctors.
In general, when the supply of something (labor) falls, the price per unit goes up.
There's a whole lot of non-exempt employees working 50 hour weeks now; the employer pays overtime for 25% of their hours. If this changes to paying the overtime rate for 36%, this really increases the pressure to train up more people into these occupations to reduce the overtime overrages.
> If the employers have to pay the same for less work (= less stuff produced), is there any realistic scenario where that won't be inflationary?
It's certainly a little inflationary, but it does more to affect how much of the share of productivity goes to labor vs. to capital and brings it closer to historic balances.
That could happen. That turns into raising the price by supply and demand, rather than by legislation. It could work out that way.
The problem is that businesses are not bottomless supplies of money. Not all businesses can just raise prices; not all can simply take less profit. Some will fail. (If everything works out just right, that will be the least necessary businesses, and will add up to 20% of hours worked. If everything works out just right.)
> > If the employers have to pay the same for less work (= less stuff produced), is there any realistic scenario where that won't be inflationary?
> It's certainly a little inflationary, but it does more to affect how much of the share of productivity goes to labor vs. to capital and brings it closer to historic balances.
Don't think in terms of money. Think in terms of the economy of stuff (both goods and services). There's 20% less stuff produced. That's 20% less stuff available to consume. I strongly suspect that most of that missing 20% is going to be missed by workers, not by capital.
Could this move "closer to historic balances" by hurting capital worse? That's possible. I suspect it's going to hurt small businesses the worst; they may be "capital", but they aren't what people usually want to target when they target capitalists.
And, "closer to historic balances"? Historic when? 1950? That was a very unusual time. 1890? That was also an unusual time, but in the other direction. What's your definition of "historic balances"?
You're assuming linear productivity per hour worked, which is a silly assumption. Productivity per hour worked is obviously going to go up when you reduce labor supply, because, uhh:
- Data clearly shows people are more productive per hour the fewer hours they work, and,
- Presumably businesses not every unit of labor that a business employs enjoys the same return on investment. If the business moves from being able to buy 1000 units of labor to 990 units, they are not going to choose average ROI 10 units of labor to remove.
- You're assuming that having the overtime threshold kick in 20% sooner (I favor 36 hours, BTW, not 32) results in 20% fewer hours worked. This seems silly.
> And, "closer to historic balances"? Historic when? 1950?
Productivity and wages tracked at about the same growth rate from 1920 to 1970. Since then, wages have stagnated but productivity has grown significantly. This has reversed in the last year or so, but it's not clear how much is transient and in any case it is not enough to make up all the lost ground.
For the typical worker this is designed to help, this would just be a 20% reduction in productivity. Employers would either reduce pay, increase prices, or hire non CA workers where possible (either remote or open an office outside CA).
Usually when work hours are shortened it comes with a guarantee of same pay and a clause for guaranteed compensation for overtime. If an industry relies on 40 hour work week the workers should then simply be paid more to compensate. If not then workers will enjoy the extra free time without any losses in pay.
There is no reason to think we need as many low end job labor hours is currently cheap to hire. We should always be shrieking the workweek and doing more UBI to figure out where the bottle necks are, and then fixing those bottle necks with technology.
There is no way this economy will reduce labor hours on it's own. Captialism has many self-regulating features but this is not one of them. It therefore must be done politically.
You are right that the labor market is not a econ 101 efficient, historically, and this minimum wage laws didn't have all those econ 101 effects people thought. But let's not carry that premise to the far: shrinking the work-week and tightening the labor market makes it more normal.
So yes business hates this at first, as distributing the work more evenly costs them more money, and lots of unproductive small bossiness will be stuck. But this is good. Eventually, paying more people will create more demand, so the bigger productive businesses, now with less small business competition, might actually like this situation. Perhaps.
This whole "we are going to dock pay" scenario would basically require cartel action, which doesn't exist for small businesses. (They don't have cartel power, they have political power to e.g. ensure lots of undocumented immigrants and what-not.) People will quit and find other jobs. The bigger corps will provide some of the other jobs.
That said, I do think coupling with UBI to smooth over the transition with more demand to ensure the small business don't even try some funny business would be good.
My understanding is that the most recent stats put median weekly earnings at just about $1k and the exemption line is $684/wk, so certainly less than half of workers are non-exempt now.
Of the non-exempt workers in the US, how many are working, for example 3 different 20 hr/wk jobs, or 2 30 hr/wk jobs? How many are working 90 hours of mixed gig-economy "jobs"? I get that the pandemic changed a lot about the labor market, but previously the trend seemed to be towards workers having to stitch together multiple things to support themselves, and it's not clear that the proposal really has caught up with the idea that a lot of work isn't done by "full time employees" any longer.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/17a-overtime
[1] https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ ("From 1979 to 2020, net productivity rose 61.8%, while the hourly pay of typical workers grew far slower—increasing only 17.5% over four decades (after adjusting for inflation").
[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/08/where-t...
[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/18/the-wealthiest-10percent-of-... ("The wealthiest 10% of Americans own a record 89% of all U.S. stocks")
The "sin" is more shared, sure. Big industry can get a lot done with new people, and thus small bussines soaks up the freed up labor just enough to keep people busy and suffering, but not so much that the labor market is tight. Small business also has a lot of power in shitty FTP democracy like ours, when big industry can't be as geographically wide spread without loosing efficiency.
By taking out the small bussiness with rising "minimal productivity", we force there to be a UBI because it's the only way the big industry can have customer's. That however in turn means big business not hiring people no longer creates the same desperation for jobs. This means that big business must have better working conditions too.
Going after yachts, alone, is stupid virtue signalling which doesn't fix the injustice that is the labor market. No one gives a fuck if Bezos's life is more boring is that neighbor asshole owning the McDonald's franchise can still bully his burger flippers.
I don't think people should "go after yachts" or that the labor market is unjust. People are as free as ever to choose where to work. Saying otherwise is simply a lie. And the government, especially the progressives who, on the whole have never run a single business between them, shouldn't tell people how to run their businesses.
Lets continue to raise the productivity floor so if you can't figure out how to make your business efficient, you fail.
Right now, we have some efficient large business, and a bunch of sad pathetic small businesses that thrive on cheap labor. The more efficient the big industry get, the more you little exurb car dealership or coffee shop can exploit people that have few other options.
These small business are receiving a huge handout in cheap labor, and it sickens me. We must depend dependency culture where any chucklefuck that bought a house a few decades can run a reverse mortgage and start a little service company, having broke has potential employees clamoring to sign up. This ingrates don't deserve the cheap labor or home appreciation and need to learn to work for living.
There, hows your rhetoric sound right back at you?
> highly overpaid higher-ups
is close. CEO's payment and personal consumption that allows is a symptom, not cause.
Yes, at the bottom end, from people already with multiple employers, the benefit will be indirect.
Reasons to think 36 hours could be reasonable:
- We've had a 40 hour work week since 1940; since then productivity has gone up by 6x, but for most of recent history labor has not shared in the gains from productivity growth.
- Other developed countries have adopted a 35 hour work week with success and are even considering 32 hours now.
- Automation is displacing many jobs; shortening the work week to reduce the supply of labor comparably makes sense.
- Alternative schedules of 9x4 or alternating 4 & 5 day workweeks of 8 hours a day make a lot of sense and would reduce stress on transport infrastructure and free up commuting time, too.
Maybe companies would then be forced to eliminate what is commonly called "bullshit jobs" and invest in process optimization. There is so much potential for trimming fat in processes, it's incredible - for example in large companies, sometimes five to six people are involved in reimbursing a 5$ expense: the employee who bought a thing, the team lead, department VP, the data entry person in accounting, the accounting team lead and the person responsible for paying out money/cutting checks. Altogether, that simple 5$ expense burned half an hour of time (or, depending how horrid the processes and tools are, anything to two hours).
If the labor cost of all these people would make such processual time waste inexplicably expensive, maybe companies would be forced to give the team leads a budget for small scale expenses and implement a fully digital process.
Or your average "daily scrum meeting": no matter the company, everyone sans the boss who wants "progress reports" to show to superiors (again, see my take above on "bullshit jobs"...) loathes it, even if it's "only" fifteen minutes. No I don't care what the fuck you are working on, if you want help for a problem or are stuck somewhere post it in the Teams channel, now leave me the fuck alone to drink my coffee in peace. A team of eight people wasting 15 min each work day is 10 working hours a week.
Or inadequate equipment: thankfully I have been at places that issued top notch equipment for the majority of my career, but I began in the public sector in sysops - and my private laptop had double or thrice the CPU and RAM power that the ages old desktop office machine. The amount of time wasted waiting for compiles or even loading Office... jesus.
Or inadequate tooling: just how many corporate processes are built on slow, complex Excel datasheetsm slow 1970s-ish mainframe UIs or require manual copying of data between applications is mind-boggling.
If productivity is sublinear, that's an even better argument for shortening the week. If you reduce hours worked by x% and production is reduced by much less than x%, that's great for society too. I mean, what's our objective-- chaining people to the workplace or getting things done?
Many jobs requiring coverage / a person to be present will still make the "reduced supply" argument true.
On the contrary, today's automation is half-assed machine learning bullshit for shits and is giggles, because there is not enough labor shortage to make the boring stuff (more kiosks, more trains, etc.) a good investment.
Cheap labor is the cause of automatino and undermines the capitalist drive for automation. The only way to us programmers to meaningfully contribute to society outside of stupid moon shots is to continuously reduce the supply of labor so their is demand for efficiency --- honest demand that isn't predicated on the tech in question being "cool".
We have plenty of kiosks, self-checkout, automated fulfillment and logistics, etc happening. We also have plenty of higher skilled jobs having portions automated. Productivity is way up in the last 50 years, and that's through automation and mechanization.
> Cheap labor is the cause of automatino and undermines the capitalist drive for automation.
Honestly, I cannot figure out what you're saying, between the pronouns, typos, and jumbled sentences.
> We have plenty of kiosks, self-checkout, automated fulfillment and logistics, etc happening. We also have plenty of higher skilled jobs having portions automated. Productivity is way up in the last 50 years, and that's through automation and mechanization.
We have indeed accumulated tons of this stuff over that time, and that's good! But the more labor id frees up, the less incentive it is to continue down that route.
Like, why buy another kiosk, if there is a gazillion people clamoring to be your cashier?
The only way to keep constant the financial incentive for further automation is to keep labor markets tight, which we either do by bumping up demand, or reducing labor supply.
My point is a lot of people talking about a "jobs apocalypse" seem to assume the technology will just happen no matter what, but that's not true. Stuff gets stuck in the research phase if it's not profitable to develop. The supply of "potential automation" doesn't create it's own demand for actually deployed automation and this is even worse, because the resulting stagnation obscures the root problem.
https://4dayweek.io/blog/benefits-of-a-4-day-work-week-the-p...
The point is under capitalism technology is prevented from reducing human labor. The more stuff is automated, the cheaper labor becomes, and there is no reason to further reduce the use of labor --- instead we get innovation that replaces more expensive machine with cheaper machines or the like.
Furthermore, the only time workers get more power is some sort of labor shortage, but if that is due to high demand there still isn't a reason to work less --- if anything, work a lot to save up for the next down term.
The is no way for the system to endogenously shrink the work-week, so it must be endogenously imposed.
UBI is very great. The real risk is not inflation, but not enough stuff or any of that other bullshit. The real of UBI is that the work ends up being distrusted highly unevenly, as we birfurcate into poor by not destitute happy do-nothings and rich happy workaholics, and the sometime later the latter group decides to cut off the gravy to the former.
(Sure that is a long ways off, and that's why UBI is a fine first step on it's own)
Shortening the work week forces the work to be more evenly distributed, which might bumb out people in the short term if they already had UBI, but is best for the long term.
I would prefer other things, but UBI is simple enough that I think it could work.
EVERYWHERE online, people are complaining about the epidemic of houselessness. it sucks for everyone.
For the businesses that have to deal with the people our society has abandoned. For the people being forced to live on the streets.
At this point we have a choice. Give the unhoused access to subsidized healthcare and housing, or accept the permanent shanty-towns like we live in a 3rd world country.
This works the problem from both ends: it supports employment and wages by reducing the supply of labor, and it still betters the situation for those who are most negatively impacted by shortened work weeks.
Until we replace all social programs with something better, less corrupt, UBI will never work
If we would really want to, we could move to 32h workweek long time ago as long as companies are not obsessed to make each quarter the biggest revenue by all means. Reducing 5 day workweek to 4 day workweek would reduce production of good no more than 20% (in practice probably much less since lots of production is automated). If each GDP is increase lets say 2% that's just equals sacrificing 10 years of those 2% increases.
In practice I don't seem it coming globally since companies compete with companies globally as well, e.g. in China many people work 996 (12h, 6days) so it's sort of unfair advantage. I think the only reason we have 40h work week in western world is because at the time when Ford popularized it USA was already a big economy without much competition in other countries (Europe just healing from WWI)
[1] https://www.npr.org/2021/12/08/1062435944/uae-work-week-chan...
Shitty healthcare and the rising cost of everything, does.
Do you have a citation for this information? I was looking the other day and was unable to find the right search terms.
A shorter week → More rested employees → Higher productivity → Similar output
https://4dayweek.io/blog/benefits-of-a-4-day-work-week-the-p...